Slaney: //It's important not to conflate newly documented with newly performed FGM. Having said that I'm not clear why at least some of the 18 cases were not prosecuted. //
Kromo: //Re: the actual practice of FGM, at what age is it typically done? Is it usually done when the girl is a baby as it is when boys are circumcised or is it done at a later age? //
5,000 new cases this year - mainly in London - according to the Beeb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40491311
(Apparently there's a "funding" issue., Slaney Well, well - just have to live with it then. Part and parcel of living in a global city?)
From the article:
"A third were women and girls born in Somalia, while 112 cases were UK-born nationals...the majority had originally had FGM done to them abroad and as a young child"
Presumably this "majority" does not include the Somali proportion, assuming that Wiki is right in its article on FGM where it states: "Over 80 percent ... are cut before the age of five in Nigeria, Mali, Eritrea, Ghana and Mauritania... The percentage is reversed in
Somalia, Egypt, Chad and the Central African Republic, where over 80 percent ... are cut between five and 14."
So I think some Somali girls will be circumcised at puberty, Kromo. I'd speculate that many girls might be taken back to Somalia for the "operation". Maybe a "doctor" is imported for the purpose.
Anyway, we know who these 5,000+ girls are. And we can assume that in some cases there will be at least a tentative medical opinion about how recently the "operation was performed".. This leaves us with.the "When?", the "Where?" and the "By whom?". Enough here, you might have thought, for at least some successful prosecution to have been brought.
In another Beeb article (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38878298 ) we may have a clue. From a midwife:
"We have one active FGM investigation ongoing at the moment, but the majority of our work in this area focuses on safeguarding referrals. This means working in partnership with our colleagues in local authorities, health and education to share information and
visit and support families with children deemed to be at risk of FGM.".
Another poster pointed out, the police preferred "education" whatever that might mean. What on earth does "support" mean? Is the "health professional" going to talk a Somali family out of doing something which their religion teaches them is obligatory ( see
http://shafiifiqh.com/question-details.aspx?qstID=173 )?
This is is the same approach as that of the police as quoted by an earlier poster) that they prefer "education" rather than vigorous prosecution of the law.
The approach will fail because you can't "educate" people to think that what they've believed all their lives to be a religious obligation is wrong now that they're living in Ealing.
In my book the approach amounts to complicity.